2018 Obamacare Premiums Surge 45% In Key Swing State Of Florida

As Congress continues to debate whether or not Obamacare is "working," folks in the key swing state of Florida just found out that their insurance premiums for 2018 are going to surge by 45% in a single year. Per the Miami Herald:

Health insurers selling Affordable Care Act plans in Florida will raise monthly premiums by nearly 45 percent on average next year, the state’s Office of Insurance Regulation said Tuesday.

Florida regulators said most of the average rate hike — 31 percentage points — came from standard plans sold on the ACA exchange at healthcare.gov. Insurers raised rates for those plans due to the political uncertainty that has plagued the healthcare debate, specifically whether the Trump administration will stop paying subsidies that lower out-of-pocket costs for low-income Americans.

Of the 1.43 million Floridians with an ACA plan in 2017, about three in four, or more than 1 million people, received a cost sharing reduction, according to federal estimates. Nine in 10 Floridians, or about 1.33 million received a separate subsidy that reduced their monthly rate, called the advance premium tax credit.

Most Floridians with a standard ACA plan and a premium subsidy won’t see their monthly costs rise, and some may even pay less than they did the prior year. But the brunt of the 2018 rate hikes will fall squarely on the 7 percent of Floridians, about 66,000 people statewide, who earn too much to qualify for any financial aid to lower their costs of coverage.

To put that surge into perspective, the average healthcare plan in Florida will now cost roughly $8,000 per year to cover a single person, a $2,500 increase YoY. Meanwhile, that implies that the average cost of covering a family of 4 is well over $1,500 per month ($18,000 per year), making it easily the second largest expense for most family budgets and in many cases the largest. Needless to say, most American families aren't prepared for their largest expenses to surge 45% in a single year.

Meanwhile, and to our great shock no less, the Miami Herald was able to find an "expert" from the University of Miami to explain why this is all Trump's fault.

Steven Ullmann, a healthcare policy expert with the University of Miami, said insurers are playing defense by raising plan premiums to deal with the uncertainty over the cost sharing subsidies.

“There’s so much indecision,” he said. “That’s the killer.”

The Trump administration has been funding cost sharing subsidies month-to-month, without making the long-term commitment that insurers say would help stabilize the ACA insurance market.

Will the Trump administration enforce the ACA’s employer mandate, which requires any company with more than 50 employees to offer health insurance to their workers? What about the individual mandate requiring every eligible American who doesn’t get insurance through work to buy a health plan or pay a fine that is either 2.5 percent of household income or $695 per adult and $347.50 for each child younger than 18?

The Trump administration also has slashed the federal government’s advertising and outreach budget for the upcoming open enrollment season, which has been shortened from three months last year to about 45 days this year. Open enrollment for 2018 coverage on healthcare.gov runs from Nov. 1 through Dec. 15.

All of this could dissuade the very people that the ACA, also known as Obamacare, needs to thrive, Ullmann said — young and healthy individuals who don’t need a lot of healthcare.

Of course, the esteemed UofM professor makes some great points if you can ignore the fact that Florida's 2018 Obamacare increases are not some new phenomenon that started once Trump took office, but rather just a continuation of a devastating trend that has been ongoing since 2013.

The Republican party has brought to a state near you Nationalized Healthcare. It is going to get so bad that the sheeple will vote for the demtards just to get relief from the out of control cost. It too will end in a spectacular boom. But what the hell.All together now..... Thank you Arizona. We appreciate your giving us Senator John McCain.And even Rand Paul does not understand the outcome of his decision.

Obama, the [idealistic] community organizer, got together with Big Insurance and Big Pharna, starting from the beginning of the Obamacare saga, designing a program that allowed one of the CEOs of the low-paying health insurance companies to score a $300-million-per-year salary per Obamacare.

Everyone who must resort to using this crappy program, mostly because they 1) are self-employed or 2) are working for a small business owner who cannot afford to offer insurance got something even worse than before Obamacare. I will not pretend that the so-called free-market health insurance system--propped up by $260 billion in tax exclusions for companies that provide "employee"-based care--was good before this lousy program.

It was not. [Self-employed] people were seeing far-too-high and rising private-market rates before Obamacare, while taxpayers controlled the price of group health plans for millions of [employees] who often horde two of the scarce jobs with benefits in one household.

These people whose ACA rates are going up astronomically often do not make as much as it appears, either. As self-employed business owners, their net income is just a third of their gross income. Their income also fluctuates, unpredictably, unlike the income of [employees] with their two often safe, salaried jobs and a tax exclusion undergirding their group-rates policies.

Rand Paul's solution is to open up the group plans to everyone, putting pressure on the insurance companies.

At this point I put the failure of Obamacare on the Republicans, sure the Democrats voted the piece of crap into law, but now the voters have given the Republicans the tools to get rid of it, and they have failed us. The republican senators that are holding out and stopping this process should be dragged out into the street and beaten to a pulp. Thank god my family and myself are all healthy, because the insurance I have been forced onto is crap. I have never spent so much money to receive so little in return. I am honestly thinking of dropping insurance next year and just put all the money into a rainy day account, fuck the insurance companies, and the fucking government, they have completely fucked everyone, just so we can provide health care to unemployed drug addicts.....oh and fuck them too.

Actually I would need to disagree with you on this item. You are correct in saying they have failed to repeal Obamacare, but failure to repeal means they want to keep it, right? Kind of like finding out your room mate is a drug dealer and you decide to not tell him to move out and just look the other way, and not say anything. Then a week later the cops kick in your door and arrest both of you for dealing drugs. You might not agree with what is going on, and prefered the situation to change, but if you do nothing and are living with the situation you are guilty by association. The republicans control both houses, the supreme court, and the office of the president and have choosen to do nothing, and in the mean time I watch working families take it in the ass as they try to figure out how to live paycheck to paycheck, fuck the republicans and all the other elected assholes inside the beltway.

You are correct in saying they have failed to repeal Obamacare, but failure to repeal means they want to keep it, right? I think it is true with some individual Republicans that they want to keep it.And then we have out-and-out liars like McCain who campaigned on repealing it, only to vote to keep it.

I'm not so sure on the accuracy of this article in that Florida (I live in Florida) does not have subsidies. Gov. Scott opted out of the Federal subsidies at the getgo, so the people affected by this huge hike is much greater than the 7% mentioned.

The Obama objective was to bankrupt and / or collapse the discretionary income and / or cause them to drop coverage hastening their death - - while giving for free welfare recipients who contribute nothing to the USA - FREE medical care via Medicaid on the back of the taxpayer who was aying the non deductible exhorbitant premiumsthis was clearly a multi stage transaction to get single payer health care - to have the country overrun with illegals/ refugees / welfare recipients / and degrade and overwhelm the health care system which would result in allocations of poor care for all

That is the root cause right there.Also note: The OblamoKare legislation was not even needed. If the demonrats are really concerned about some group of people not having "health insurance" (OblamoKare is not about "healthcare", it is about insurance premiums - period) then they could "fix" that with no laws. All they needed to do was set up a foundation or corporation or charity or whatever they want to call it and run a "health insurance pool" for those they consider disadvantaged. They have plenty of multi-billionaire donors who could have funded the thing with pocket change. They could put BS (Bernie Sanders), Nancy Piglosi, and HRC in charge. Then they could be as happy as clams, they have satisfied their stated objective.Since they chose NOT to do something like that then their true objective is not what they said. They call themselves "the smartest people in the room". If that is the case then why did they make this so hard? And why are they hell-bent on destorying the entire healthcare system in the USA? We all know why - their objective is P-O-W-E-R, not helping anybody (but themselves).

Baba read the article...90 percent wont see an increae in what they pay. Guess who is paying for the increase.... Its you and I.....So they get the same free shit and we pay for it.....No for the 66,000 who arent parasites well sorry for your luck...

All of the people with low incomes are not on the few-stuff train. The citizens who get this welfare freebie are often the same ones getting other freebies: free housing, free food, monthly cash assistance, nearly free daycare, free electricity bills and refundable Child Taxfare Credits of up to $6,269. The 27 million [individual] citizens who cannot afford to purchase an Obamafare policy due to financing their own unaffordable rent and groceries via low-wage, part-time, churn jobs also pay for this socialism for some through a penalty that takes their $300-or-less [on-average] tax return.

That is what government always does, inconsistently, and strangely at the expense of citizens more than noncitizens. They cannot stand the thought of sending the "800,000" noncitizen DACAs back to the country where their parents hold citizenship, but they will screw 7% of U.S. citizens in this and any other matter without batting an eyelash. That is why the meaning of citizenship and the efficacy of voting as a citizen in a Republic is fading.

Everyone is fixated on premiums... which are bad enough, but deductibles and especially COPAYS are the killer , especially when the healthcare industry is allowed to gouge at will with rent-seeking monopolies that Obama entrenched and Drump/ GOP are happy to ignore. Final spending on healthcare is staggering, especially if a family member is managing a chronic condition.